Tuesday, 31 December 2013

As
another year ends, I note that I have once again managed to post less on this
blog than last year. At this rate I am on course to achieve complete radio silence
by 2017.

Perhaps
this is no bad thing. One of the many salutary bits of advice in William Strunk
and E.B. White's classic book The Elements
of Style is that no writer
should offer their opinions 'gratuitously' because to do so is 'to imply that
the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case'. In fact, it almost
certainly isn't the case. But sometimes,
in the blog- and tweet- and comment-osphere, it can feel like everyone is
shouting over each other to no one in particular, convinced that the demand for
their opinions is, all evidence to the contrary, brisk.

Meanwhile
all the books I am supposed to read lie in a big pile on the sofa, some of
which have even been sent to me in the hope I will read them: a guilt mountain of
paper and print. So my new year's resolution is to spend a bit less time
writing and a bit more time reading. Reading other people's unread words seems
a more generous act than adding yet more to the unread pile. Perhaps there are
already too many words in the world.

I'm not sure whether I will be able
to keep my resolution. It seems to be an occupational disease of writers to
keep churning the words out whether the market for them is brisk or not. As Juvenal writes in his Satires: 'Tenet insanabile multos
scribendi cacoethes', or 'the
incurable itch to write affects many'. But I will do my best. Happy new year if
you are reading this, and Lege feliciter, as the
Venerable Bede said: 'May you read happily'.

Sunday, 29 December 2013

When I was growing
up in the 1970s and 1980s, kitsch Christmas television seemed as timeless a
tradition as wassailing. But it seems I was part of the first generation to be
so blessed. Browsing the TV listings for Christmas 1963, 50 years ago, I am amazed
how unfestive they look. Alongside a few familiar staples like Billy Smart’s
Circus and Christmas Night with the Stars, there are run-of-the-mill episodes
of Z Cars, University Challenge and Emergency – Ward 10. On Christmas Eve, ITV did
not even bother to start until mid-afternoon, and by Boxing Day the schedules
were almost back to normal.

Then, in 1969, a
miraculous birth brought joy to the world: the first Christmas double issues of
the Radio Times and the TV Times. Their separate covers – the Radio Times a
tasteful montage of ribbons, wintry scenes and carol singers, the TV Times Des O’Connor in a Santa hat – seemed
to encapsulate the cultural differences between the BBC and ITV. But they each inaugurated
an era of three-channel colour TV in which every sitcom or quiz show would have
its own Christmas special and the cathode-ray tube would fizz with fake snow
and winter woollies for a fortnight.

The moment from this
halcyon era that has entered folk memory is 8.55pm on the evening of 25
December 1977, when 28.5 million people are alleged to have arranged themselves
in front of a TV to watch The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show - and this
despite the fact that theirs was always the least Christmassy show in the
schedules, with barely a slither of tinsel in sight. What no one now remembers
is that ITV’s Christmas programmes in 1977 were so unappetising that, when the
schedules had been announced a few weeks earlier, several advertising agencies complained
that they would have no audience for their commercials. On Christmas night, ITV
showed Sale of
the Century, Stars on Christmas Day (a special edition of Stars on Sunday with ITV
personalities singing carols) and the film Young Winston. To have detained half
the nation for an hour and ten minutes with this on the other side was not,
perhaps, such a historic achievement.

It was, in fact, a
recurring motif throughout the 1970s that Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas show was
not as good as last year’s. The 1977 show was not one of their best. Starting
with a lame skit on “Starkers and Krutch,” it finished not with that triumphant
“There is nothing like a dame” number from South Pacific, but an oddly flat
scene with Elton John playing piano in an empty studio while Eric and Ernie,
dressed in drag as cleaners, looked on. Les Dawson, interviewed by the Daily
Express a few days later, felt that “the ending didn’t quite come off”. The DJ John
Peel found them “extravagantly unfunny” and thought “their best work in several
years was the current television commercial for Texaco”.

But even if
Morecambe and Wise were never as funny as they used to be, it is touching to
learn how much neurotic care went into their Christmas shows. Their writer,
Eddie Braben, took five weeks to write each one, working 16 hour days including
weekends, driving himself close to a breakdown. Morecambe was such a
perfectionist that, when he watched the show with his family on Christmas
night, he would cough strategically to distract them from any slight fluffs
left in the edit.

It is customary to mourn
the lost capacity of TV to create these shared moments that seem to matter so
much to both performer and audience. Christmas TV, meant to be watched ritualistically
en famille, especially inspires such lamentations. The announcement of the
BBC’s Christmas schedules this year produced the usual complaints about its falling
back on tired formats like Open All Hours and Strictly Come Dancing. But as the
recent Channel 4 series Gogglebox suggested, many viewers still turn on the set
in search of familiar rituals they can enjoy together. Despite all those
predictions at the start of the digital era about the imminent demise of
“linear viewing,” we are not all deserting the living-room set to watch Netflix
on our iPads.

The media historians
Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz once compared the mass viewing of television to the
seder, the Jewish ritual marking the start of Passover. Jews celebrate the seder
in their own homes with their extended family, and yet these millions of
synchronised, homebound microevents assume the existence of a symbolic centre,
a sense that the Jewish diaspora is celebrating together at the same time. Dayan
and Katz saw television, at its great collective moments, as a similar kind of “festive
viewing,” a powerful social chemistry bonding society together.

You might think this
too heavy a responsibility for the Christmas Day edition of Mrs Brown’s Boys to
bear. But TV’s defining quality remains that it can be viewed by lots of people
simultaneously. And since it is an undemanding form of togetherness that asks little
of those who sign up to it other than that they are all watching Doctor Who or Downton
Abbey, it can create a sense of commonality among people who have little else
in common. This attachment to the communal nature of watching TV has survived a
post-Thatcherite market logic which prefers to see us as individual, rational
consumers. In fact, I have a vision of the diasporic television community of
fifty years hence, assembled in twenty million living rooms from Lerwick to St Helier. Everyone is flicking through the Christmas
edition of the Radio Times, with its time-honoured small-display ads for walk-in
baths and garden sheds at the back, looking for something familiar to watch.

Monday, 23 December 2013

'My feet haven't retained the memory
of skating, but then it isn't a natural experience for feet to be constrained
in an unbending boot from sole to ankle and raised on a quarter inch of steel
blade so that they never actually touch the ground. Feet don't skate, but they
experience skating. You sense the solidity of the ice through the blade in a way
that is quite different from being on any other hard surface. Concrete doesn't
feel as ungiving and absolute as ice. You slide over its surface, but there is
no engaging with it, no sense, as you get even with concrete, certainly with
rock and paving stones, of surface texture, of tiny undulations, of there being
earth beneath. Rink ice is a solid block, whose depth you sense as you slick
across its surface, as a swimmer senses the fathoms beneath them buoying them
up. But the sea moves, engages with the body of the swimmer, while the ice is
enigmatic, separate from the skater.

And yet, to skate is magical, as you
find yourself coasting free and frictionless. The clear distinction between
yourself and the ice you are on strengthens the sensation of your own body and
its capacity both for control and for letting appropriate things happen. And
for all the perception of physical mastery, skating is still strange and
dreamlike. Dreams of flying are the nearest you get to the feeling of being on the
ice.' (pp. 15-16)

Nowadays every British town and city
seems to have at least one open-air ice rink at Christmas time. With the
addition of fairy lights, and in a spectacular location like the Brighton
Pavilion or Winchester Cathedral, these can be quite magical, although the ice
rink in Liverpool One is a pretty unenchanted affair.

The town-centre
Christmas ice rink seems to have entirely replaced the phenomenon of wild skating.
According to Sue Clifford and Angela King, in their wonderful book England in Particular, it was common until
recently to skate on the lakes and tarns of the Lake
District. In his Guardian Country Diary, A. Harry Griffin
described how in 1929 the railways ran excursions from London and other cities
to the 'Lakeland ice carnival', where 'there seemed as many people on and
around the "toe" of Windermere as on a busy summer's day in Blackpool'.
In one memorable edition of the ITV regional programme About
Anglia in January 1963, in the coldest winter of the century, the presenter Eric
Joice presented the programme from Wroxham Broad in Norfolk, sitting at a desk perched on the
frozen water while reporters skated round him under the arc lights. But Clifford
and King report that 'since
the 1950s land drainage schemes have meant that many of the safe places for
skating – flood meadows – are no longer available'.

I like
the idea of skating, but I won't be doing any of it this Christmas, as the only
time I have tried it felt as unnatural an experience as Diski describes it, and
I never got to the coasting free and frictionless stage because I kept being
stuck in the falling over stage. But like Joni Mitchell, I sometimes wish I had
a river I could skate away on.

Anyway, a
Merry Christmas to anyone who reads this blog, whether you have a river to
skate away on or not.

Sunday, 15 December 2013

Nina Stibbe’s new book, Love, Nina,
is made up of a series of letters she began to write to her sister Vic when she
moved to London as a 20-year-old in 1982 to work as a live-in nanny for
Mary-Kay Wilmers (editor of the London Review of Books) on Gloucester Crescent
in Camden. Halfway through the book, Stibbe begins an English course at Thames
Polytechnic. There is some interesting stuff about what it’s like to be an
English undergradute in the 1980s, and it made me think that there has never
been (to my knowledge) a history of student life. What time they got up, what
they ate and drank, what conversations they had in the Students’ Union, what
they did in lectures and seminars, how they revised for exams: most of this
experience has not been written down and will be lost except to an enterprising
oral historian who might want to get a move on while the baby boomers who
swelled the student ranks after the Robbins report can still remember that far
back. I offer up this idea for free to any passing historian because I no longer have
the energy to do that sort of thing myself.

This is Stibbe’s description of a
seminar c. 1984:

‘You
must contribute (intelligently) to the discussion, otherwise it looks as though
you haven’t read the text(s). The academic might say, “Who’s actually read
this?” and “What’s the point of coming?” to those who haven’t. Sometimes people
who haven’t read the text are told they may as well leave the seminar and that’s
the ultimate shame.’

Needless to say, this particular
aspect of the student experience is no longer part of the £9K offer.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog